Embark on a perilous journey through a frozen wasteland and uncover the chilling echoes of those that tried before...​

FM HPE 102.4

My sixth project in a group with level designers, animators, game artists and other programmers. The second game made in Feather Engine, our own engine.

Things I worked on during this project.

  • The camera

  • The fog walls

The Camera

I worked a lot on the camera during this project. The way I implemented it was to have a joint on the player rig were the camera was placed, but with an offset in position.

With this implementation, the camera would always move with the player character, and when the mouse was moved, the joint was just rotated, and the camera along with that.

We also had another joint that we called animCam below progCam, that our animators could move how they want. We ended up never using this joint, but it’s intended purpose was that the animators could use it in special animations to make the camera move more dynamically, like in a cutscene.

Basic visualisation of the rig. The rest of the animator’s rig is under the pelvis joint. We asked for a progpelvis joint too to rotate the player without rotating the camera with it.

I wasn’t satisfied with how the camera could move through objects, and the way I solved this was to cast two segmented rays from the player, one from the top, and one from the bottom of the player mesh. If both rays collide with something, the camera is moved to the position where the top raycast hit.

Drawing of when the two rays hit the ground

The Fog Walls

Since I was the programmer who knew the rig, I also made the player turn around if the player tried to go outside of the playable map. The way I did this was by setting up two colliders, one that activates the sequence, and one to physically stop the player if the sequence fails.

The sequence itself was made with a timer and a length of how long the sequence would be going on. When the timer hit halfway, I turned the player and the camera around. I also made the fog come closer in a non-linear way. To make sure that the camera would not be inside a fog wall, I used the two rays from before and checked if they intersected with the fog walls. If they did, I added a little more to the timer.